Executive Briefing | McKinsey| August 2016

A must read article which reinforces the difference between customer touch points and customer journeys and why we must understand the end-to-end customer journey.

Customer journeys are significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes than are touchpoints. Armed with advanced analytics, customer-experience leaders gain rapid insights to build customer loyalty, make employees happier, achieve revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent, and reduce costs by 15 to 25 percent within two or three years.

Key points:

• Observe and understand the interaction through the customer’s eyes.
• Identify and understand the customer’s journey.
• Quantify what matters to your customers.
• Define a clear customer-experience aspiration and common purpose.
• Redesign the business from the customer back
• Align the organisation to deliver against tangible outcomes

Start with a differentiating purpose and focus on improving the most important customer journey first—whether it be opening a bank account, returning a pair of shoes, installing cable television, or even updating address and account information. Then they improve the steps that make up that journey. To manage expectations, design supporting processes with customer psychology in mind. Transform their digital profile to remove pain points in interactions and to set in motion the culture of continuous innovation needed to make more fundamental organisational transformations.

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